~sunblocker

  • 2 Posts
  • 24 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: January 15th, 2022
  • ~sunblockertoPrivacy•Forcing VPNs to collect your info will spread!
    1·
    3 years ago

    It depends on what kind of threat you want to protect yourself against. VPN technology was never meant to do what most every day people are using it for these days.

    A self hosted VPN will encrypt your network traffic between your device (laptop, smartphone, you name it) and your VPN server. So that cute hacker chick in the internet café can’t see what websites you’re browsing. But from your VPN server to the final destination, you’ll have the rely on TLS (as in, HTTPS for example) which is secure but then the question is, what do you need the VPN for in the first place?

    An argument can be made that websites have a harder time following your smartphone around the real world by tracking the changes of your IP address. Because the VPN server has a fixed IP address and websites will only see this one IP address when you use your VPN instead of seeing “oh, now they’re using their home router’s IP address after having used their mobile internet provider’s IP address, so they must be home now”. But then again, using this fixed IP address as the only user, websites can easily identify that it’s you because nobody else uses your VPN server’s IP address.

    A commercial VPN service lets many different people use the commercial VPN server’s IP address so there’s much noise and it’s hard for websites to make conclusions just based on the IP address.

    But there’s a catch: beyond masking your IP address no VPN service (self hosted or not) can add additional protection. There are so many more things besides your IP address that websites use to track your every move across websites and even across different devices you use. A VPN cannot protect you from cookies, fingerprinting techniques, malicious downloads, hackers, …

    So what can you take away from all this? While a VPN can be one part of your online security strategy, it alone isn’t enough for privacy or security online. I’d recommend you do your own research on the topic and get a feeling for the evil things that websites and other actors can and will do to you, what data they collect and what they can learn from it. Armed with that knowledge you can evaluate what you see as the greatest risk in your situation/circumstances and protect yourself effectively using the measures you really need. Maybe you’ll come to the conclusion that a VPN will help you achieve your goals, most likely you will need additional measures on top of or independent from a VPN.

  • ~sunblockertoPrivacy•*Permanently Deleted*
    3·
    3 years ago

    Delta Chat is so underrated. You have to go in the settings to “enable” regular emails though which might be a deal breaker for people who just want to input their username and password and never touch any settings beyond that.

  • ~sunblockertocryptocurrency•*Permanently Deleted*
    3·
    3 years ago

    I’d be interested in some reliable data on the environmental damage Visa and MasterCard cause, just out of curiosity and to put crypto into perspective with “traditional” means of payment. I don’t aim to downplay the dangers of crypto, I just want to know things about the “other side” as well, while we’re at it.

  • ~sunblockertoOpen Source•*Permanently Deleted*
    3·
    3 years ago

    You can use the linux command pwgen to generate usernames. With the right arguments, it generates almost pronouncable names of random syllables.

    pwgen -A01 [<length> [<amount>]] is the general syntax. -A01 makes it so that you get all lowercase without numbers and one username per line. The <length> parameter lets you choose how many characters your username should have and the <amount> parameter lets you choose how many usernames it should suggest.

    Example: 5 usernames with the length of 10 characters:

    $ pwgen -A01 10 5
aefaegeina
avubeixaik
shienaitie
jaethuekeg
yoreivoozu
  • ~sunblockertocryptocurrency•A new Twitter NFT feature gone wrong.
    1·
    3 years ago

    Last time I checked minting a new NFT was like 300 bucks for just transaction fees or whatever the minting fee is called these days. The image may have been pirated for free but putting it in an NFT is expensive. Is there a way to mint 10’000 NFTs at once and pay the fee only once? Because then the initial fee could be spread over a large number of NFTs and potential buyers.

  • ~sunblockertoPiracy•Avoid Time Cap Download on Maxstream
    2·
    3 years ago

    No, I don’t know for sure. But I have a few ideas. You can try opening a new incognito window of your browser for each additional download. If that doesn’t work, you can try using a VPN, possibly in combination with an incognito browser window. Alternatively, you might want to try the Tor Browser. I have no idea whether or not any of these methods work with Maxstream since I haven’t tried it. Your mileage may vary. Please only use these for legal purposes as they don’t provide any protection against lawsuits if you do illegal stuff.